The view that England and America have discovered their errors in education and are moving towards a common point is advanced by Robert McN. McElroy, professor of American History at Oxford University in the current issue of "Current History." Professor McElroy, who was formerly at Princeton, discusses the tendency in America to assume that one and all are fitted for higher education. Harvard and Yale house units, he says, are in no immediate danger of becoming Oxonian. His article, in part, follows:

In educational matters, England and America are slowly approaching a common point, by the simple process of moving in opposite directions. That common point is the point at which both nations shall train for leadership the best minds, carefully selected for capacity, and shall train also the less gifted minds for the no less important tasks of efficient, contented and self-respecting subordination.

Any sound system of education, in whatever nation, must provide both for the training of leaders and for the training of those only fitted to be followers, but until recent tendencies began to emerge, England concentrated upon the first to the neglect of the second, while America neglected the first and fixed almost her whole attention upon the second. The central fact of recent English and American educational history is the fact that each nation has discovered its error and is seeking to correct it.

Opening Doors

England is now rapidly moving toward effective universal school training, not alone in primary, but in secondary grades as well. And the universities are rapidly opening their doors to the product of the ever-increasing secondary schools, instead of confining their entrants almost exclusively to graduates of the old "public schools," (such as Eton and Harrow, which correspond to American private preparatory schools).

In America, on the other hand, the most marked tendency is to devise methods for selecting, at each stage of education, the minds best fitted to benefit by further, more advanced study, in an attempt to develop more effective selection for higher education.

England's too exclusive emphasis upon the training of leaders was, of course, the natural outcome of her ancient and still dominant social system. It led inevitably to the conclusion, which Washington so often expressed with reference to military leadership, that the best leaders almost inevitably come from what is called "the ruling class." Thus, England's earliest educational development, indeed, almost her only advanced educational development until 1870, was the highly exclusive and class-conscious "public schools" and universities.

Miscellaneous Mass Training

America's too exclusive concentration upon miscellaneous mass training was doubtless the result of a theory of human equality which early took root in the Colonies and found an unfortunately ambiguous expression in the Declaration of independence. But nothing is more certain than the fact that when Thomas Jefferson used the phrase, borrowed from John Locke, "all men are created equal," he had no intention of giving voice to the idea that all men are born with equal capacity for thought, equal gifts for leadership, equal potentiality of personality, equal ability to profit by the pursuit of higher learning. In the Virginia Bill of Rights, which he wrote some weeks before he drafted the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson used the more concise and definite sentence, "all men are by nature equally free." There is here no ground for the idea of equality of natural endowment, an idea which caused generations of Americans to consider it undemocratic, un-Jeffersonian, to question the natural right of any individual to remain an educational charge upon the public for as many years as he pleased.

Indeed the carefully expounded educational philosophy of Jefferson is the very antithesis of this. Early in life he set himself the task of devising a plan of public education for his native State of Virginia, a brief summary of which appears in his "Notes on the State of Virginia." The central feature of this plan is careful selection of advanced students upon the bases of natural gifts and their separate training as leaders, or, to quote his own words, the "culling from every condition of our people the natural aristocracy of talents and virtue and . . . preparing it by education, at public expense, for the care of the public concerns. . . We hope to avail the State of these talents which nature has down as liberally among the poor as the rich, but which perish without use if not sought for and cultivated."

In spite of Jefferson's carefully elaborated theory of democratic education, America, in the name of the equality of men, has allowed her higher institutions of learning, her secondary schools, colleges and universities alike, to be clogged with a mass of reluctant, if not inferior minds, to the detriment of the best and with comparatively little advantage to the worst material there congregated. President Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia University was recently reported as stating that 78 per cent of the college students of Columbia--undergraduates--remain in Columbia University or go to some other university for graduate and professional study. But, within twelve months of this surprising statement. Dr. Samuel S. Drury, Rector of St. Paul's School, Concord, N. H., confessed that "not over 75 per cent of each graduating class here, for example, can show either the intellectual fiber or the vocational urge to justify higher education."

"Minds Willing and Able"

Most American educators are now alive to the fact that 919,381 enrolled college and university students, the product in too many cases of chance, fashion or fancy, are by no means the triumph of education which they once thought them. Instead, they are now seeking a way back to Jeffersonian democracy in education, a method of unscrambling the egg, a system which shall restore to higher education its democratic duty of confining its ministrations to minds willing and able to profit by care and direction.

Of all recent tendencies in American education, this is probably the most wholesome, for what America most needs is a leadership trained for its vast responsibilities. For over a century and a half America proceeded upon the theory that if you open all grades of education to all kinds of minds, and leave them open and without cost to the individual, the natural leaders will automatically emerge. But they have not emerged. Sound, sane, informed leadership has failed the nation more and more as she has extended her system of wide-open training schools.

"Educated American Ill-Informed